JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
A.I.—Artificial Intelligence
In A.I. the surrogate child’s
pre-programmed love for his
human adoptive mother sets
a tone for the film’s affective
register. Love in all its mind-
blocking, sentimental naivety
is stubbornly acted through—
like a program.
Saving one life:
Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence
as redemptive memory of things
by Drehli Robnik
To a consciousness that suspects it has
been abandoned by human beings,
objects are superior. (Theodor W.
Adorno)
The following is a tentative exploration of affinities
between Steven Spielberg’s and Siegfried Kracauer’s
conceptions of cinema and memory. This filmmaker
and this cultural theorist have missed each other in
the histories of film and theory, but the visibility of
concepts in Spielberg and the concepts of visibility
in Kracauer echo each other. My point is not,
however, that Spielberg is in any way “influenced”
by Kracauer. In general, I am not drawing on
notions of linearity and causality as they inform
culturally hegemonic ways of understanding
history, its temporality and its cinematic images.
Rather, my emphasis is on memory: on cultural
memory and cinema’s contribution to it. The
empathetic and affective aspects of cinematic
memory; questions of survival and redemption, as
they are posed by the history of modernization; the
possibility to reevaluate reification and the love for
“things”—these are key concepts and perspectives I
will employ. My essay offers an interpretive reading
of Spielberg with Kracauer (and vice versa) and of
Spielberg’s role in blockbuster culture from the
vantage point of A.I.—Artificial Intelligence (2001).

In A.I. the Flesh Fair
sequence reworks elements
of the concentration camp in
Schindler’s List, the slave
ship in Amistad, and the
landing sequence in Saving
Private Ryan.
Much like David in A.I., the
boy protagonist of Empire of
the Sun is victimized by
history, infected by a delirious other hand, can be cast as notoriously retrogressive
techno-mysticism, refused the and romantic. A.I. is so obviously not about
possibility of being just a boy, questions of robotics and neurosciences, a more
and thus left not knowing
quite who he is.
The intelligence of
Spielberg’s blockbusters
In an article on Spielberg’s A.I.—Artificial
Intelligence, philosopher of language John R. Searle
accuses the film of missing the point of the research
field of A.I.: In his view, Spielberg´s film creates the
impression that science is on the brink of creating
machines with a consciousness. However, research
on artificial intelligence, Searle asserts, has only
striven for computerized simulations of human
intelligence.[1] Some film critics also disconnect
Spielberg’s film from concepts of intelligence. To
critic Kent Jones, A.I. shows once again that
Spielberg’s intelligence is just “typically American
know-how.” The spiritual dimension of intelligence,
he implies, rather belongs to Stanley Kubrick from
whom Spielberg took over the A.I. film project at an
early stage. According to Jones, Kubrick placed his
project “in the hands of someone he knew to be
utterly incapable of grasping the problems it
posed”; still, every image in the film is “haunted by
Kubrick’s genius.”[2] In his review of A.I., J.
Hoberman poses a similar dilemma: “Does the
artifice belong to Spielberg and the intelligence to
Kubrick?“[3]
It’s easy to find Spielberg’s films simple-minded.
It’s also easy to see a lot of intelligence in Kubrick’s,
especially since many of his films take up the theme
of intelligence. Kubrick’s films deal with intelligence
by analyzing its cultural-technological artificiality—
from evolutionary quantum leaps into using tools
and computers to trained short-circuits of
reasoning and to a boy’s sixth sense, back then
referred to as “shining.” Spielberg’s films, on the
adequate title might have been Artificial Love. The
problematic gift which robot-boy David is blessed
with is, after all, not his outstanding intelligence,
but his capability to love. The surrogate-child’s pre-
programmed love for his human adoptive mother
sets the tone for the film’s affective register; love, in
all its mind-blocking, sentimental naivety, is

History is the “list of death.”
But cinema can rewrite it and
miraculously turn it into a “list
of life” which takes care of
victims of modernization.
In his 1990s films such as
Saving Private Ryan,
Spielberg focuses on
moments of the characters’
suffering and also .....
stubbornly acted through—like a program.
To dissolve the deadlocked opposition of (artificial)
intelligence and love, I propose to take a larger look
at how Spielberg conceives relations between
cinema and love. His filmmaking involves an
intelligence radically different from what Jones
called a pragmatics of “know how.” My discussion
of Spielbergian intelligence does not relate to a
man/author but to a cinematically defined project
recognizable in global mass culture by Spielberg’s
name. To make an argument about his specifically
cinematic kind of intelligence, I will make detours
through Spielberg’s conceptions of history and
memory and discuss his affinities with the film-
aesthetics of Siegfried Kracauer before taking us
back to Spielberg’s love with a difference.
Intelligence can be basically described as the ability
to understand. In Spielberg, the ability to
understand means to understand and sympathize
or rather empathize with others. To convey this
kind of intelligence, Spielberg relies on the
blockbuster – a type of film that appeals to most
audiences and is as universally easily understood as
it is globally profitable (A.I.’s relative box-office
failure notwithstanding). Most blockbusters,
especially Spielberg’s, are upgraded versions of a
cinematic mode that has proven to be most reliable
when it comes to ensuring the audience’s ease of
understanding and empathy: the Hollywood genre
movie. Hollywood blockbusters provide recognition
value: their mode of address relies on a stereotyped
audiovisual shorthand, but also on spectacle and
affect, which is undergirded by cinema’s
phenomenology of “affection by attraction.” That is,
film can provoke understanding through empathy
as a function of its capacity to provide sensual
stimulation to the audience’s perceiving bodies.
Seen this way, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993)
relies not only on sentiment and melodrama but
also on its mobilizing near-compulsive mimetic
emotions. These are the means it uses to unlocking
apathetic indifference towards Jewish suffering in
favor of something close to empathy in the film-
consuming public spheres—even German and
.... on what remains from Austrian ones.[4] This is not to underestimate the
humans who have suffered value of an audience’s gaining understanding
violent actions. through being “touched” by images and sounds, and
having empathy generated in the sensual dialogue
of the film experience, in the sense that Vivian
Sobchack describes the phenomenology of film.[5]
There is more at stake—more “intelligence”
involved—than just the audience’s reflex response.
It is even more than the “reflex of sympathy” which
film critic Merten Worthmann sees triggered by A.I.
[6]

Spielberg uses the intelligence contained in genre

and affect in quite specific ways. He brings to
contemporary Hollywood a concept of temporality
and subjectivity not frequently found in U.S. genre
cinema. The latter is predominantly pragmatic in
orientation. It celebrates the attractiveness and
sheer presence of problem-solving human action
taking place in the here and now and directed at
future goals. In contrast, Spielberg not only focuses
on moments of the characters’ suffering and
inability to act, but particularly in his 1990s films
also on what remains from humans who have
suffered violent actions. Spielberg´s orientation
toward these remains disengages genre cinema’s
intelligence from its usual pragmatics of an
embodied consciousness active in present space,
and instead links the cinematic image to culturally
mediated memory. One might argue that many
recent Hollywood blockbusters manifest an
obsession with memory, especially with the
remembrance of disastrous historical events. If
blockbuster sensibility can be seen as turning to
appropriations of the past and its most critical
moments, Spielberg´s recent work—especially after
the meaning-effects produced and symbolic capital
accumulated by Schindler’s List—is paradigmatic to
this turn.

Redemption from oblivion

Spielberg understands memory as offering a
possibility for redemption. His concept of the
relation of cinema and memory is close to the
“redemption of physical reality” from the
destructive course of history. This concept was
articulated by Siegfried Kracauer in his aesthetics
and phenomenology of film and re-evaluated in
recent work by Heide Schleupmann, Gertrud Koch,
and above all, Miriam Hansen. To Kracauer, film
has the potential to form a cultural memory based
on perception instead of on narrative. The cultural
memory unique to film remains outside, even
opposes the teleological mainstream of history. To
be more specific, cinematic memory can oppose a
historical dynamic determined by “grand
narratives” and disciplinary forces of
modernization. Film’s images can redeem material
fragments of everyday life from oblivion; they can
confront us, to the point of bodily encounter, with
the detritus of reality left behind and neglected by
ruling powers of history.[7]

According to Kracauer’s version of realism, realist

film breaks with modes of narrative closure,
psychological motivation and centered subjectivity
(the very aspects which contemporary film studies
regard as “realist” in the classical Hollywood sense).
This realism allows cinematic memory to gather up
modernity’s waste product which is, as Heide
Schleupmann insists, still modernity’s product. This
means that film can affect our senses with images of
a life that does not fit into the streamlined
continuity of rationalization. To put it differently, in
more Foucauldian terms: film can contribute to a
memory of dispersed moments of potential
resistance to disciplinary “bio-power.” Kracauer
insists on film’s potential for alienation, for shifting
a mass public away from normalized modes of
perception. His view of film is thus linked to his
concept of history, which he understands as a mode
of experience rather than as a way of making
meaning by narrative closure. In Kracauer, history
provides for near-sensual encounters with a past
which is indeterminate and in ruins and which
eludes the grasp of teleological narratives.[8]

In the context of my argument, it is important that

Kracauer attributes film’s capacity to encapsulate
memory not only to neorealism with its attention to
the dispersed details of an unbearable everyday life,
but also to Hollywood´s sensation-oriented genres.
He refers to slapstick comedy with its affinity to the
undetermined and fortuitous, and to the way
thrillers, war and disaster movies toy with somatic
perceptions of horror. In this latter respect,
Kracauer’s 1960 Theory of Film is a liberalized
version of the radical sensualism articulated in his
unpublished notes to this book. In his 1940 notes,
as interpreted by Miriam Hansen, Kracauer saw
film as seizing “the human being with skin and
hair,” which is why “[t]he ‘ego’ of the human being
assigned to film is subject to permanent dissolution,
is incessantly exploded by material phenomena.”[9]

We might compare this statement to the landing-

sequence of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan
(1998). This sequence plunges its audiences into a
cinematic immersion in 20th century’s destructive
materiality. It exemplifies a sensualist aesthetics
which highlights some of the affinities between
Kracauer’s and Spielberg’s conceptions of history,
memory and film aesthetics.[10] A.I. does not
explode our sensorium in this manner, but equally
partakes in Spielberg’s blockbuster-version of
cinematic memory as escape/redemption from the
history of modernization. While Saving Private
Ryan provokes empathy with the experiences of
disciplined bodies threatened with mass destruction
through modern warfare, A.I. deals with destructive
effects of disciplinary modernization itself. The fact
that this film appears like a science fiction-version
of Pinocchio does not contradict such an
interpretation. Pinocchio—the late 19th century
novel which in Kubrick’s drafts to A.I.’s script
provided a guideline for the robot-boy’s quest for
self-knowledge—can be read socially as narrating
the effects of industrial and pedagogical discipline
on an instrumentalized docile body.[11]

Between Schindler and Ryan, I had a lot

of complaints from my kids that Iím not
making movies for them anymore. I
think A.I. is a movie for my own kids.[12]

Spielberg’s words here might be understood as

calling A.I. a children’s movie. Given the wide-
spread prejudice against this type of film, it would
be easy to use such a definition as an argument for
the “lack of intelligence” that some critics see in A.I.
But Spielberg’s statement also might imply that A.I.
extends certain kinds of experience and subjectivity
predominant in his 1990s films to the universe of
children. A.I. once again shows that the
memorialization of holocaust-survival is
paradigmatic to Spielberg’s conception of memory
and history. In particular, the “Flesh Fair“-sequence
in A.I. reworks elements of the concentration camp
in Schindler’s List, the slave-ship in Amistad (1997)
and the landing-sequence in Saving Private Ryan.
The Flesh Fair articulates in spectacular terms,
invoking the aesthetics of cyberpunk, a master
race’s deporting a minority, denying human rights
to commodified living beings, and threatening
horrifying physical dismemberment. Spielberg’s
closest precursor to the confused robot-boy amid
the Flesh Fair’s baroque architecture and
destructive technological wizardry is, however, the
kid protagonist of an earlier Spielbergian attempt at
dealing with traumatic moments of World War II:
the British boy in the Japanese internment camp of
Empire of the Sun (1987). Much like David, that
child is victimized by history, infected by delirious
techno-mysticism, refused the possibility of being
just a boy and thus left not quite knowing who he is.

In Spielberg’s world, being human means living a

problematic identity since people face the threat of
being turned into expendable things. Seen another
way, what does not fit into the historical course of
rationalization-as-reification is the surplus of life
within the thing, its suffering, need for love and
protection. The living thing is in danger of a neglect
which film has to counter. Schindler’s List,
Amistad, Saving Private Ryan and A.I.
acknowledge the traumatizing impact of a historical
dynamic that leads to reification on a mass-scale.
The rupture which the Shoah marks within
disciplinary bio-power’s historical rationality is as
paradigmatic for Spielberg as it is for Kracauer. In
both Spielberg´s film and Kracauer´s reading of the
philosophy of history through film aesthetics, the
problem of surviving mass destruction is posed in
terms of a crisis of memory. History appears as a
narrative of destruction and loss; it cannot account
for its victims and their experiences of suffering in a
way suited to create empathetic memory. The
creation of empathetic, affective memory is the key
role of popular cinema. Cinematic memory can
wrestle anecdotal “micro-narratives” of rescue and
survival from the grand narratives of history. It can
keep reification from producing nothing but
oblivion by testifying to the life contained within the
thing. The affirmation of cinema´s redemptive
power over history becomes a tangible image in
Spielberg´s films. History is the “list of death.”
Cinema, however, can rewrite it and, almost
miraculously, turn it into a “list of life” which takes
care of the victims of modernization.

Both Kracauer and Spielberg see the modern mass-

subject as having been uprooted from bourgeois
definitions of being human. Modernization breaks
with notions of organic, individual, self-evident
personhood. With David, the robot-boy, this kind of
radically modernized subjectivity is projected into a
future (our present) in which life is really—not just
formally—subsumed under technological capital. As
A.I.’s tagline “His love is real. But he is not,” puts it,
David is a thing and therefore not a real boy. But his
suffering from the need for love is all-too real. This
grants the thing a degree of reality which is
problematic. The “realism” of the living, loving
thing means that we cannot rely on binary
differentiations between the truth of humans and
the falsity of things.

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